Pat Burns Is Dead

Pat Burns was a great coach, someone who up-to-now has been criminally ignored for induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Hopefully the NHL will fix this and do it quickly. Besides coaching my Canadiens back in the day, Burns also represented to me the epitome of a Canadian and a hockey coach: besides looking like a real life Ray Zalinsky, Burns had a fire and passion for hockey that was sui generis. If you were to cut that man open he’d bleed vulcanized rubber and ice. He was so tough that it took cancer 3 cracks to bring him down. Here he is back in the day:

You don’t love that, I don’t want to know ya.

And a far more trivial note but one that I think still does the man justice: Burns had sported some of the premium mustaches and hair cuts in all of sports.